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Friday, January 31, 2014

Hundreds of Naked LEDs Make This Lamp Look Like a Starry Night Sky

The diodes on most LED-powered lamps are hidden from sight behind plastic or metal—after all, not everyone wants to see the electronic guts of their devices.But after a look at these beautiful lamps made from hundreds of raw diodes, it's hard to imaginecovering them up.

Human Since 1982 —aka the German-Swedish design duo Per Emanuelsson andBastian Bischoff —debuted the lamp at Design Miami last month. How does it work? Simple: Each of the hundreds of diodes stands on a metal place, which supplies the tiny amount of electricity needed to power each cell.

The designers call it Light Culture, a reference to the fact that the glass box makes the diodes look like cell cultures in a petri dish. According to Emanuelsson and Bischoff, it's as though they've been "carefully bread and nourished protected by the glass cover for scientific study of the led illuminants inherent characteristics."

The reference to natural science is a good one—and it's actually not the first time Emanuelsson and Bischoff have made it. Their first LED lamp, Collection of Light, treated diodes like rare butterflies in a naturalist's specimen box: